Not to Smell the Earth

If reality is shaped by what we perceive through our senses, then it makes sense that our world changes when even one of our senses suffers any alteration. In the back of my head I always knew that I would be devastated if I lost my sight, even my hearing, but I don't think that I ever thought of other senses until realizations like not being able to smell the flowers that were being sent to me, came about. I didn't notice it at first but food didn't taste like much of anything and once my mind became a bit clearer I noticed that I could not remember what the man by my side smelled like. I had gotten used to burying my face in the crook of Phil's neck letting his scent take me to sleep and at one point I could not remember what that was like anymore. How could scents lead to comfort? This, I cannot explain; but I definitely knew that some things were lost to me and every time I thought about it I felt diminished. These thoughts combined with the the medications* I was taking created a world where I never felt I belonged and all I could think of was running back home but I couldn't even get out of bed... The realization that I lost my sense of smell came rather slowly.

***

As I left the hospital the skies turned gray and raindrops were lifting the Earth as they fell. The coming of the rain always had a way of taking me back to my childhood home. It forced the smell of Earth into my nostrils and it never changed; it was always the same smell I first learned when I lived next to the mountains of La Paz no matter where I was in the world. As we were driving back home I could see the dirt rising but I could not smell it and at that moment I realized that all of the memories I associated with the smell of damp Earth would never be the same. It used to be that that smell would trigger those memories to flood back into my mind where I could see them, hear them, smell them- relive them. This won't happen again.

***

I was told that the injury on my head was at the spot where the olfactory nerves stem from to get to my brain, so my nerves were severed and it was highly improbable that I would get my smell back. As hard as I tried I could not keep my eyes from filling with tears as the Doctor explained this to me. I left her office knowing that I would never be the same, everything would be missing something. The problem with all of this was not that I could no longer smell, but that I had been able to smell everything up until the night of the accident and the thought of those memories were what tortured me, the loss of the memories that I wanted to keep.

One day however, one Best Friends Day, I was sitting by a picnic table eating a veggie burger with some friends when the smell of smoke filled my head. At first I didn't think about it but then I saw smoke rising from a grill and I realized that I was smelling it. I was excited but then thought to myself that I probably remembered that smell because I was in a situation where it was to be expected. Then something that I will never forget happened as I hugged my friend Karolina; I could smell her perfume and when I told her about it she caught herself in mid sentence while telling me that she had put tons of it on; she also understood what was going on and she gave me a huge hug as we shared that moment.

Perhaps all is not lost, perhaps one day I'll be able to taste food like I used to, maybe one day I'll smell the Earth again. Perhaps I had to sacrifice something to get back to reality; where I know that the best teacher is the Earth that I walk on and absolutely everything about her carries a message. In this case she left me in pieces and forced me to fight for every single one of them; and as I slowly started feeling like something like myself again, I felt like I earned every lesson.

From your ruins comes your greatest treasure- your truth.

* I've had some time to reflect on the effect that the painkillers had on me and I've come to the realization that I should have known that pain happens for a reason. Through something like this you need something to focus on, otherwise your focus will find other things to obsess over which inevitably for me are all the things that I couldn't do. Pain would have told me to focus on my body and what is conducive to healing instead of the things that only require patience. The painkillers allowed me to ignore my body and when I stopped taking them I was forced to go through several weeks of withdrawal which in my case meant innumerable sleepless nights were I was plagued by restless limbs going into uncontrollable shaking episodes.